Ethics
by theleague-ofshadows
Summary: A plan to murder the latest resident's baby leads towards a confrontation between Violet and Tate that Violet is either ready for or dangerously not. Following "Afterbirth" by three years, which has given Violet a lot of time not wanting to face Tate and him a lot of time to stay silent.


Hello readers! This is my first attempt at a fic that is not TDKR. I'm sorry if this is not what you were hoping to be notified for.

I have noticed how little Violate stories this website has. It's disappointing.

This fic follows three years after "afterbirth" and into a world of my own, though it follows mainly a similar story line. I just wanted to write how I saw this story going after I finished the season on an unhappy note that things weren't answered. It's not AU and will have a few chapters to ten at least.

I own none of the characters or even the show, I have no right to anyway, I'm not that good of an author to even compare. Please keep in mind I have only added a few things of my own.

Enjoy!

* * *

**Ethics**

Written by theleague-ofshadows

Chapter 1

* * *

It had been twenty five months since an accident. Two years since a death. To the Harmons, that was progress. A kind of progress that had no equal value.

Violet Harmon was nearing her second decade; a good three years since her death and an extra half since they had crossed the country to leave behind the 'depressing shit' – as her mother had once put it – and start a life that was free of stress.

Ten points to the asshole who suggested they buy the Murder House. Twenty to the angsty teenager who confirmed the sale.

But in reality, though she knew only death and horror and complete sorrow could come out of this house, she could not imagine living her life elsewhere. Not for any amount of time or money.

Maybe for her family's benefit and for the goodness of the possibility that they would still be alive would she wish for a normal Hollywood lifestyle. But even in her most secretive dreams– if she could still dream—she would never dream about such a fucked up cookie cutter life.

Maybe it was all of the music she listened to and the nonchalant lyrics about the only thing to care about had to be living free; taking a drag in every waking moment. And that didn't include chasing some role in a toothpaste commercial.

No amount of headshots interested her. She never wanted to be an actress. Nor did she believe she had the talents or proper capabilities to be one.

She was not what she would call pretty. It was not an act of modesty to think so. She knew her appearance was not the one with the least flaws. The girls at her previous schools had made sure of letting her know that.

Violet wondered what they were doing then. They were most likely in class at some preppy college stressing over how they could _ever_ get their assignment turned in on the exact due date.

Violet had a twisted smile one her lips as she pulled the cigarette from between her lips and exhaled through her nose. She had never really kicked the habit but no matter her father's persistent nagging, she knew that he and her both knew that it had no effect on her dead body.

She scoffed humorously. The benefits of being dead.

And forever being locked in her seventeen-year-old body meant she could never get rid of all of the memories. She figured that if she at least grew into the young woman she was supposed to be, she could look in the mirror and at least see something other than her past. But if she never aged, she would never forget. She was to be twenty now. Twenty years old. An adult.

But the image of her petite teenage body made her sick to look at. What good ever came out of those years? All of the cutting and the pills. Her father's therapeutic talks about depression. Her mother's watchful eye and false smile. Everything was wrong. Off balance, perhaps, and she knew that her mind was dark and that her parents had enough evidence to prove to her that what she was interested in did indeed have many shadows. Ominous shadows.

But she was not an ill minded person. She never had enough intent to kill someone, maybe except for Leah and her band of skanks but that was before Leah encountered Thaddeus and Violet could not be as pissed with her after that. Not after Leah had a disgusting reminder after it. And it was a shitty thing to do—scare her.

Tate should have known better.

Violet shook her head then and tried to diminish all thoughts of him. She supposed she was not as mad as she had come to be after all the time spent in the house of horrors. All that he was to her was a sad memory and the thought of him was either a flame that was blue and wild or orange and kept. She avoided all situations that involved him and she supposed it had been months since she had last seen him. She knew he knew that she didn't want to see him. She was thankful that he hadn't shown himself.

Hayden however, was a consistent bitch. Harlot. Her slim body hadn't changed like all the rest of the inmates to the Murder House and she used it as a persistent weapon to seduce her way around. Violet's father had become more persistent in finding crafty ways to get rid of her. Her mother, Vivien, had even more creative ways. But Hayden found more interest in taunting Violet then in harassing her parents.

"Got a razor, Vi? Any chance I could borrow it? I think I have some…. feelings to suppress." Her nympho smirk twisted and she ran her thin fingers up her thighs. She stepped closely to Violet and sat in the chair opposite her. Ruining her cigarette break with another taunting session with the bitch from hell.

Violet sighed, irritated, and reached across the table for the ashtray and twisted the end of the cigarette until the heat in the tip had died. There was just a phantom smoke coming from it now and Violet pushed the chair back and started to stand.

"You scare so easily. I sometimes wonder how you kept up your "tough bitch" façade for as long as you have." Hayden leaned back in the chair and picked an apple from the bowl at the center of the table. She ran her fingernails along the skin and looked up at Violet under narrowed lids. She was around for trouble. Violet knew better than to waste her time.

"You call it scared; I call it avoiding the narcissistic whore who hung my father by our second story chandelier in attempts to keep myself from literally removing her spine from her body like I did the last time."

Hayden's smirk twitched and Violet watched her eyes glint with fury for a smidge of a second. In her previous encounters with Violet, the situation would result in Violet making some smart ass comment and leaving while Hayden smiled and brushed it off. The cycle would repeat itself the next day or if Violet was lucky, the next week.

But one day last fall, Hayden pushed Violet too far and Violet resulted in retaliating in a way she never had before.

"You don't have the balls to do something like that again, and I have more friends in this house who can make you pay if you do." Hayden leaned forward and bruised the red apple in her fingers; Chad never liked the red ones.

Violet did not smirk but she knew that she had scared Hayden in a way. It had been a bloody business and she made a rather process of it instead of killing her instantly the first time.

"Friends?" Violet scoffed. "Constance's arm candy? Nora? The religious stabbing victim? Pray tell how they have come to love a juvenile slut such as yourself."

Hayden threw her head back and let out a hearty laugh, placing her hand across her heart then turning her eyes to Violet's. They glinted with humor. "And you have much more support? Beyond your parents and that little drool monster, who do you actually have here that you talk to?" Hayden stood up and trailed her fingers along the island, her tone becoming venomous and sultry.

"Tate's hasn't been bitching to me about how you won't fuck him anymore, so I assume, since you obviously haven't been laid in quite some time, that he has moved on from _you_, darling." She ended the sentence with a cold smile and raised her shoulders in mock innocence.

Violet bit her cheek, trying hard to suppress some of the anger. Her words of Tate shouldn't infuriate her so. And she honestly had gotten beyond the point of feeding the fire inside of her when he was brought up. She was not angry. Not anymore. The first year was long, and she felt it more then than she ever did before. Her boyfriend had done more wrong than she could see past and from the moment she told him to leave her alone, she stood by her decision.

The first year was the longest. And she truly believed in that year that she hated him. It wasn't until the second year that she knew that she didn't. She didn't hate him, but forgiveness was not something she could give. She just tried not to think of him. And the lack of his appearance made it easier for her to end the hatred and to focus truly on her life in the present. She hadn't seen him in months.

Violet loosened her clenched jaw and felt her fingers uncurl at her side. Hayden's words couldn't bother her. They wouldn't. She did smirk, however, when an idea crossed her mind.

She stepped forward, her confidence making her walk more of a sway, and quickly gripped the blood red apple from Hayden's hands. Hayden looked up at her, infuriated, as Violet bit into the fruit. A small antagonizing action, but it was just as satisfactory as pulling the vertebrae from her body.

"Funny." Violet muttered as she backed away, satisfied with her previous action. "Don't know why Chad doesn't like the red. They are quite enjoyable." She began turning to leave when she realized she had one question unanswered. "Oh, and Hayden? The razors are in the clasp box above the sink. Please feel free to drag one across your throat."

Hayden's eyes narrowed but she tried to hide her fury. Violet turned then and walked further throughout the house while Hayden yelled something after her about her father and her twisted agenda that she just hadn't given up, but Violet _had_ given up listening.

She found herself in the living room without remembering walking there. She would do that a lot. All of the years she had been dead, she would think that by now she would be able to control her fading human abilities and _walk_ instead of just be transported unintentionally.

The light from outside shone through the windows and that day the light was brighter than she had remembered it ever being. Bright enough to see whatever was floating through the air. It wasn't like she had super powers because she was dead, but she swore she could see every dust particle that roamed the room in that instance. And moments like that scared her; they made her feel impossibly small. So she turned her eyes from the window where the beam shone through and walked over to the book shelf and picked up one with thick leather binding and found that she had already read it so she set it down. She wanted to read something she hadn't already.

The stack of books there were all familiar. Violet sighed and moved, remembering firmly to use her legs this time, and made her way to what used to be her parents' room, knowing that the family who lived here at the moment had already unpacked their books.

They were a larger family than the previous ones. Six children in one visitation were more than the last three families combined. Violet didn't know why three person families enjoyed such a large house. She tipped her hat to the family who wanted to live here that had more mouths to feed then fingers on their left hand, even though she knew that they weren't going to stay very long.

The oldest child was eighteen. Her name was Anne. She had two younger twin siblings named Sasha and Jon, who were eight. Coral was six, Joseph was four. The baby of the house was named Melanie and she was only two years old.

Their parents were Colin and Sofia Barge.

That day, the Barges had left for a trip to the zoo. The bratty male twin bitching about how his parents never let their family do anything fun. But Violet watched closely just as the children were being told of their plan and she smiled to herself as Coral and Joseph squealed with delight. Times like those were the ones she wished she herself hadn't taken for granted. She would have given anything to be able to go to the zoo. She would have given anything to leave this house for good.

Violet walked through Anne's room, her nose wrinkling at the smell of charcoal from all of her drawing. The room that had once been hers was now an art studio for the emotionless teenager who was far too easy going for her own good. Vivien called it "open minded."

Violet walked over to the boxes under the windowsill and took the pocket knife from the bedside table and slid the blade down the tape line. She opened the cardboard flaps and dug her fingers through the scatter of CD's and magazines and her fingers curled around something sturdy enough to be a book. She pulled the literature up and squinted at the title.

_Jane Eyre_

Violet's smile suddenly vanished. She had read this book in high school—the time she actually went – and she remembered it to be a tragic romance. Though she was a closet admirer, she knew the last thing she needed to read was a romance novel.

Sighing with irritation, she tossed the book back into the box and didn't bother making it looked unopened. Any day now the neighbors would move out. It hadn't even been a week and Violet and the others had been breaking enough things and making loud noises to scare the members of the family. She could feel the others getting testy. Though many wanted to cause trouble for the sake of making others feel pain, Lorraine had made a promise a few years prior, that she would leave the families untouched. Her need for vengeance, she had learned, was not going to be cured by harming others. She had joined her family and Moira and a few others in scaring the members of each family enough to make them never want to come back.

The only people that Violet knew she had to worry about were Hayden and her band of followers. As long as Ben stayed with Vivien, Violet knew that Hayden's death would never be justified. At least not to Hayden's standards.

But her family was growing stronger. No amount of temptation could sway her father. Violet realized that he truly loved her mother and that was all that she cared about. Her family was finally pieced together once more.

Violet rummaged through Anne's desk drawers, trying to find a good piece of literature, a fine arts book, a fucking text book about the Civil War for all that she cared. Just anything but Jane Eyre.

Sighing, she gave up once she found nothing. Why was it so hard to find a nice book? Violet huffed loudly and pushed the hair from her eyes. She turned to walk to the hallway, her fingers brushing the edge of her dress as she moved defeated through the house. Another day of playing checkers by herself? Was there another option?

Violet made use of her time here, trying hard not to complain, but feeling shit-out-of-her-brains bored with everything and everyone. She just wanted to read something.

Violet found that instead of playing checkers, she wouldn't mind listening to the iPod that she stole from one of the previous inhabitants. The night that they scared them away, the family was too terrified to even notice its absence. And Violet enjoyed it, even though the husband's taste in music was awful. She then found herself downstairs again, cursing herself for thinking too hard on getting to the electrical device that she actually forgot to move in a human manner to get it.

She walked down and around the house to a section that would lead her to the underground part; the only part that had no visitors and the place that she kept everything that actually meant something to her.

It was also the place where Tate had brought her to show her the corpse of her former self. Though now, her body was nowhere to be seen.

One afternoon, nearly a year after she had found herself, she came back to the location of her body to brave the situation once more and to give herself a sense of release. Disgusting as it seemed to her now, it seemed the right thing to do at the time. But when she came down to see the pitiful remains, suspecting to see an inhumanly pale, thin, larvae infested corpse, she saw nothing. Nothing at all.

She couldn't fathom who would even bother with her withered remains until Moira had let it slip that she had seen Tate carry an object covered in an old, worn blanket out to the Chrysanthemum bushels and lay it there; coming back for a shovel. Curious, Moira had told Violet and her parents that she didn't understand it, but the boy in the striped sweater leaned over and kissed the bundle of fabric before her dropped it carefully into the earth. Moira suspected that it was an animal of sorts, based on the cloud of insects following it, but Violet knew.

Tate had buried her by the orange flowers. The ones she always cared for.

There was still the phantom smell of death and rotting, and Violet still found that place disgusting, but she kept every secret and every single thing she loved stored in that room. The place she had rested unpeacefully until Tate had set her to rest. She quickly moved past the dead rat that's skeleton still wreaked of sour flesh, and to the brick wall that always had a few loose stones. She wiggled one out of its slot and stuck her fingers inside to search for her iPod and earphones, hoping that she hadn't set them too far back.

She pulled them from the small hole and smiled as she began crawling back to the doorway that lead into her house. She closed the door and stared at the latch for a long minute. She had suddenly felt overwhelmed. She didn't know what had caused it either. Her fingers slipped from the small door and she sat down on the chair she had used to climb into it. Her fingers found her forehead and she sat, her fingers shaking uncontrollably.

She felt herself slowly losing it. She had honestly felt it more in that moment than any other. These moments would happen on rare occasions and Violet would do nothing to initiate them. She would be helping her mother cook chicken fajitas and she would stare at the frying pan and begin wailing softly and gripping her abdomen. Her mother was so startled the first time it happened that she almost hit Violet with her vegetable knife in surprise as she turned sharply. She would lie out on the bed of her room and be selecting random records of the boy who lived there and she would find herself squeezing the record until it felt as if it would snap beneath her fingers. She didn't know what caused these moments.

She didn't know at all.

Fuck.

There. She felt it again. Right there behind her eyes, she felt the burn. It had been a long time since she found herself able enough to cry and she felt it an eternity since she had a reason. She didn't have one then, even. She inhaled sharply shook her head fiercely. She wasn't going to waste her time on this. Wiping furiously at her damp cheeks, she stood up and plugged in her earphones to each ear.

The previous husband's taste in music sucked, but at least he had a few Nirvana songs. And nothing got rid of the unreasonable panic attacks like "I Hate Myself and Want To Die" on the highest volume possible.

* * *

"Ma, did you open the box by my window?"

Anne's voice vibrated through the walls of her room as she yelled loudly. She frowned at the opened box and looked around for the knife she was sure she left on her bedside table.

Her mother hollered back. "No." Her mother's voice came from the room down the hall. She sounded concerned. "Is something wrong, sweetie?"

Anne exhaled with confusion but shifted her lips and relaxed a bit. Violet watched from the shadows in hopes that maybe Anne would be able to show her the location of her literature. Anne growled, however, seriously irritated that she couldn't remember if she had opened the box.

Then she heard a blood curdling scream and something shatter.

She turned quickly and her lips parted in shock as she ran to her doorway. "Ma?" Violet wondered if she had fallen. Then the scream continued, on a different pitch this time.

The sound sent Anne running to find her mother. Violet found herself being drawn to the sound and forward. Without her consent, she was taken to Sofia's room and there she screamed with ferocity as she backed against the wall and tried to shove away someone.

Chad, in fact. She could tell by his slim physique that it wasn't Patrick nor Travis. Not even her father. Chad held his forearm to Sofia's throat and hissed when she dug her nails into his side. Violet looked wide-eyed at him. Why was he doing this?

Sofia screamed out her husband's name then. Chad struggled to hold her close and keep her from running. The door slammed and locked and Violet could hear Anne screaming for her mother.

Violet could feel a pulsing aura around and then she noticed Patrick, meeting Chad at his side and pulling a screaming Sofia from behind. Chad turned to the cradle under the window and pulled Melanie in his arms, pulling a pocket knife from his pocket. Violet shook her head. What were they doing!

"Chad!" Violet shouted. Chad did not turn his head. He knew who it was that had called him.

"Ugh!" He practically growled. "Patrick, get rid of the child."

"Kind of busy." Patrick shouted over Sofia's shrieks.

"COLIN!" Sofia wailed. Her eyes were starting to roll up to her skull as the pressure of Patrick's arm became increasingly harsher.

"You're killing her, you stupid shit!" Violet screamed. "You're not supposed to kill her!" Scare them! The plan for all of the inhabitants was to scare them away, not sentence them to eternal damnation. Why were they doing this? They wouldn't want this family stuck here with them. Chad hated the husband, said he was a distraction to Patrick. But Patrick was a sex addict, or seemed as if he was one. He liked anything that had a cock. Chad also complained about Sofia's singing, and the smell of Greek food that she cooked the night of arrival.

Why were they doing this?

Then Violet remembered the baby's age. And then she knew. The baby was two years old. As old as Chad had wanted and as old as she would be when he killed her.

Then Violet charged at Chad, trying to push him over and grip the baby at the same time. But she didn't estimate the distance or her speed correctly, however, because just as she had a hand on the child, she felt Chad's blade slice through her skin.

Violet's grip loosened and she clutched the knife's handle softly, her lips parted but she made no sound. She fell backwards to the floor and the vibrations from it sent pain searing up her side. She laid down, her back flat against the wood. Chad leaned over her and quickly pulled the knife from her abdomen.

Violet made a sharp noise of pain.

"You stupid girl." Chad exhaled, aggravated. "You upset the baby." He indicated to the child he set back in the cradle. There was not even a smidge of sympathy that he had just stabbed Violet as he knew that she couldn't actually die and never come back.

Violet felt the pool of blood forming underneath her. She inhaled and exhaled raggedly, trying to find a rhythm. It had been a long time since anyone had hurt her like this and she had forgotten how humanizing death really was. She was so used to the supernatural by now.

An uncertain plea for whoever might hear it was sent from Violet without words and she clumsily wrapped her fingers around Chad's leg in attempts to pull her body upwards and decrease some of the bleeding but Chad shrugged her away with disgust. Violet watched as Chad stood upright from his knelt position and walked back over to the crib. Sofia thrashed in Patrick's arms as the screaming outside the door continued.

Chad stared down at the baby then to the pocket knife for a minute before he closed the blade and threw it to the floor unceremoniously. Violet didn't know why she sighed with relief because she guessed she knew he was going to pick up the pillow from the crib and begin smothering the child with it. She just didn't suspect that Chad was capable of making such a horrific sound when something sharp entered his body.

Violet turned her eyes to try and glimpse the person who had stalled Chad's actions, but her vision was getting too blurry and opaque. All of that damn blood she was losing was causing her to lose feeling in her toes. She heard Patrick's roar of inept hatred and she was sure she was fading enough to properly be dead soon.

But she wasn't fully gone before she heard Patrick call out a name.

* * *

Violet woke what seemed only minutes later, but later that evening, her father told her it was quite a few hours before she had come back. Something about the newly dead having a smaller potency for early resurrections.

Her mother came to her side when she heard Violet's gasping and coughing. "Sweetheart, are you okay?"

Violet blinked a few times before she let her fingers curl around the blanket on top of her and she twisted her body to sit upright in the couch. Her mother's light curls swarmed her face as she leaned over and brushed her fingers lightly against Violet's.

"Mom?" Violet groaned, her voice thick and hoarse. "Where is he? Where's—"

"He's gone, sweetie. Chad and Patrick are gone and so are the Barges." The pressure of her soft fingers was just right against Violet's temple. "Though, we'll probably see Chad and Patrick around soon enough. I'm sorry that they hurt you, Vi."

Violet frowned slightly and was tempted to shake her head because that didn't answer her question. But her father came in the room suddenly and sighed once he saw Violet's open eyes.

"Violet." He crossed the room quickly and met Vivien at her side. "You scared us, darling."

Violet coughed slightly and sat up fully. Nothing hurt. Not anymore. Not like it used to. "I wasn't trying to."

Ben smiled and nodded. "I know. It was very brave what you did."

Violet scoffed. "Obviously." Her stab wound to the stomach really proved that.

Vivien rolled her eyes. "You know what he means, Violet."

"Where the hell are all the good books in this house?" Violet muttered, trying to change the subject. "I don't get into—" She pointed to her abdomen, "—crazy shit when I'm not bored out of my mind."

Vivien sighed at her casual swearing, but Violet knew that her mother didn't mind nearly as much as she acted. Vivien found Violet's honesty better than her backwards reclusive teenager ways.

"The Barges didn't have any?" Her mother mused.

Violet shook her head with a tired attitude. Her mother pursed her lips.

"Well maybe the new family will have some and you can snag a few before we scare them off." Vivien's smile grew grave then. "I'm really sorry that you got hurt, darling. They were foolish to try and take that baby. We should have been there."

Violet shrugged a bit, her eyes meeting her mother's. "It's okay."

Vivien squeezed her daughters hand and gave it a small pat, her eyes becoming animated. "Well, Jeffrey's been crying all afternoon. I bet he wouldn't mind his sister taking a turn at trying to make him feel better."

Violet groaned and slid back down into a laying position. "Mom, I just got stabbed, I'm hardly the person to make the 'Little Noisy Monster' shut up. Why don't you take care of him? Sing him a song or something."

Vivien glared a bit at her daughter's snarky attitude, but eventually smiled softly and nudged Violet's arm. Violet grinned.

"You're shift's after dinner, Vi." Her mother said smoothly.

Violet covered her eyes with her fingers. "We don't have to eat anymore, Mom. Why do you always make us eat? Doesn't it repulse you?"

Vivien shook her head and raised her hands before she stood up. "I will not become one of these bored, depressed commoners just because I am dead. I am a housewife and a mother to two mouths now and I will not lose my daily rituals no matter how useless they are."

"Well it's stupid." Violet muttered, shaking her head with unusual humor. Normally she would fight her mother to the bone on this issue, but she was too weak.

"You're lucky you've had a rough night, because it's your night to marinate the steak."

Ben and Vivien laughed at Violet as she made a rather rude hand gesture. Violet guessed she really loved how her family had become. They were not judging any longer. And Violet wasn't as concerned with being rebellious. She was exactly who she intended to be. She didn't need to prove anything.

When her parents left the room, Violet sat up and slid the blanket off of her legs. She stood up and walked over to the chair that her iPod was left on and she picked it up. After scrolling through a few songs, she found one that she enjoyed enough to play for the moment and twisted the earphones into the crevice of each ear.

It sure hadn't taken the Barges very long to race out of the Murder House. Violet wondered why, however, the police hadn't come. The other families had called the police on them. She wondered what it was that had happened after she had blacked out. Then she remembered.

She remembered what she heard. What name Patrick had called.

She slowed her walking and she looked up at the string of the attic. She knew he would be up there. He was always up there. Playing with Beau. Rolling that red ball back and forth for hours and hours.

Violet bit the inside of her cheek and exhaled heatedly. She wouldn't go up there. She hadn't for years. Because she wouldn't risk running into him again. And even though she knew that Beau must miss her and that she was acting childish for letting such a petty reason keep her away, she did not go against her judgment. She stayed away for a very long time.

Violet continued walking, resisting the urge to ball her fist. But something inside of her felt off balance and like an annoying itch. A burn that only became more heated with time left uncared for. And she knew why she felt so. She knew the reason behind it.

Because Patrick had fumed and raged as Chad was being stabbed and she knew who he had called out in an accusatory manner. She knew the name all too well. The very name that she had uttered one of the many times she skipped down the stairs after he told her to meet him that midnight. The name that belonged to the boy who had meetings with her father. The name of Constance's son and Adelaide's brother. The name of the boy who stole kisses from her in the late of the night and the one who gave her a black rose instead of a red one. The name she still had burned in her skull after reading all that he had done. The name she whimpered when he had stolen her virginity. The name of the man who raped her mother. The very name she had mentioned after she had screamed the two words that had severed all relations with him for a very long time.

And didn't even have to wonder what would make him come out of hiding. He had made her a promise after all.

He had said he would never let anyone hurt her.

She supposed even after all that had happened, he still tried to keep it.

* * *

A/N: The first chapter is short, and maybe they all will be, but I have a feeling these chapters will get bigger.

I know, I suck at trying to write my own story of these two, but please tell me in detail how horrid I am. Reviews are like Ryan Murphy and I'm a true believer in him. So send me whatever thoughts you have and what ever you think of this.

And I'll update as soon as possible.


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